On blindspots
Gil Dibner

Today, I received feedback about a founder I work with—someone I care about deeply and respect immensely. Yet, this particular piece of feedback landed in my inbox with an ominous and daunting weight. The issue raised is not unsolvable. In fact, it’s one of the more straightforward things to address. It’s not tied to a character flaw or a personality problem, nor is it a result of malice or incompetence. It’s also not the first time I’ve encountered this specific feedback about this individual. By all accounts, this feedback should not have been particularly difficult or upsetting to receive. And yet, it felt especially challenging for one overarching reason: as I read it, I realized we were dealing with a blind spot. In this case, it has to do with prioritizing one type of business activity (getting a product into customers' hands) over another (product iteration and perfection). The founder believes he is prioritizing rapid release over product perfection and genuinely wants to maintain this focus. However, in practice, this is not what’s happening. Instead, the product appears to most outside observers as bogged down in iterations and refinements, delaying its release and adoption. The problem is not one of strategy. The problem is one of perception.

Entrepreneurs face countless challenges on their journey, often dozens in a single day. These problems span every domain of building a company, developing a product, and managing people. Most entrepreneurs are natural problem solvers: they are drawn to difficult, complex challenges and relish breaking them down into smaller, solvable pieces. Blind spots, however, represent the most difficult class of problems to address because, by their very nature, they disappear when you search for them. A blind spot, in essence, is an inbuilt inability to acknowledge a specific issue—either its existence or its problematic nature.

As a VC, I have a view from the sidelines. I can observe and comment, suggest and recommend, nudge and encourage. Sometimes, I can make a noisy nuisance of myself until a founder pays attention to the issue I am worried about. However, dealing with a blind spot is uniquely difficult because, even when the issue is pointed out, the founder just can't see it. Blind spots are uniquely difficult because, even when a founder is prompted to address them by a well-meaning friend, advisor, or VC, they may remain invisible.

So how can you detect if you might have a blind spot?

• Start by actively seeking feedback from diverse perspectives—team members, advisors, peers, and even customers. Look for recurring themes in the feedback you receive: if different people highlight the same concerns, it could indicate a blind spot.

• Closely examine areas where you feel confident. These feelings can sometimes mask deeper questions and uncertainties. If you find yourself having the same argument with different well-meaning people, you might be suffering from a blind spot. What if they are right?

• Intellectual honesty and a willingness to question your own assumptions are vital to recognizing and addressing blind spots. Cultivate these habits in every way you can. Attempting to think from first principles at every opportunity can be helpful here.

• Finally, get explicit. At every opportunity, openly acknowledge the potential existence of blindspots in your discussions with others. Accept that everyone has blindspots and that learning to detect them and address them is critical to every successful entrepreneurial journey. The more you have explicit conversations about potential blindspots, the more likely you are to eliminate them.

Blindspots can add tremendous amounts of risk and massively delay the progress of a company towards its goals. The good news is that blindspots disappear as soon as they are detected. The tricky part is that no one can see them for you.

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The next Transformer. A new paper from Google introduces "Titans," a novel architecture family designed with a focus on learning long-term dependencies by incorporating a fast, parallelizable neural memory module that leverages past data and surprise metrics. Their novel approach combines attention for short-term context with a learnable memory that is trained in a meta in-context manner to store information at test-time, demonstrating improved performance over Transformers and modern linear recurrent networks, especially in tasks requiring long context understanding. This approach to memory management represents a potential inflection point in the performance and scalability of neural models.

Nvidia's Israeli Bet. Nvidia's commitment to a large-scale data center in Israel signals a continued strategic investment in critical R&D for their AI chipsets and adjacent technologies. This facility, one of the country's largest, underscores Israel's importance in the future of AI compute infrastructure. It also presents potential opportunities for co-investment or observation across the local AI ecosystem.

On task. OpenAI just launched Tasks, a precursor, undoubtedly, to their “agents” play. Now ChatGPT can manage tasks asynchronously on your behalf. Some great example use cases highlighted here.

AI Agents at Work. Some examples of AI agents at work from Aaron Levie at Box: mainly focused on automating mundane, yet crucial, tasks like contract reviews and RFP responses, freeing up human employees for higher-level, strategic work. This early adoption demonstrates the potential for AI to reshape workflows by automating repetitive processes and shifting human roles toward task decomposition, quality control, and expert oversight. While still in its nascent stages, Box's exploration highlights the significant opportunity for software innovation in enhancing AI agent tool use, reasoning, and collaborative capabilities within enterprise workflows.

Bye bye bankers? Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon says that AI can draft 95% of an S1 IPO prospectus “in minutes” (a job that used to require a 6-person team multiple weeks). “The last 5% now matters because the rest is now a commodity,” per Solomon, in the FT this past week.

HOW TO STARTUP

Synthesia’s leap. Synthesia's $180M Series D validates the rapidly growing market for AI-powered video creation, highlighting their strong traction with enterprise clients and a substantial user base. The company's evolution beyond basic avatars into a comprehensive platform, incorporating features like dubbing and translation, positions them well for continued growth. The focus on pairing next-gen avatars with LLMs and interactive video indicates significant expansion potential into personalized and real-time communication.

AI meets Crypto. An interesting argument from Frank Rotman of QED: the practical implementation of AI agents, Rotman argues, hinges on crypto infrastructure, leveraging smart contracts for permissions, wallets for transactions, and blockchains for accountability. This convergence provides a framework for AI agents to move beyond suggestions and execute real-world tasks in a secure and verifiable manner. The synergy between AI and crypto represents a significant opportunity to unlock the full potential of both technologies, enabling a new era of autonomous, digital assistants.

36 months to $100M. a16z just announced its investment in Cursor, revealing they’ve built a $100M run rate business in just 36 months. Full investment memo from Martin Casado and team here.

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Europe’s VC shakeup. The European VC landscape is experiencing a significant contraction, with a 30% drop in active funds and a substantial decrease in fundraising, suggesting a shift towards established players and specialized smaller firms. This flight to quality is creating a challenging environment for mid-sized funds and potentially leading to an increase in "zombie" funds as LPs demand better returns. The industry is reconfiguring itself, as evidenced by management changes and partner departures, signaling a period of uncertainty and potential opportunity for those with a differentiated strategy.

Israeli tech resilience. Despite wartime disruptions, a surprising 70% of Israeli tech companies project growth, demonstrating resilience, though a significant 80% urgently require funding within the next six months, highlighting a critical need for capital. Many firms are implementing cost-cutting measures to navigate operational challenges, like reserve duty call-ups, and despite this, 38% maintain optimism, signaling potential for strategic investment if the funding gap is addressed. The ecosystem's collective focus on bolstering infrastructure and increasing investment points towards a proactive approach to ensure the long-term viability of Israeli tech.

The current state of venture. From Ed Sim, a perfect encapsulation of the current state of the venture market: the number of companies with a $500M+ valuation keeps rising, but the number of exits for $500M+ has fallen off a cliff. More data here.

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